On transparency: part 3
Or, How Wikipedia talk pages are like newsrooms.
As Newsmaven’s recent comments reminded me, I’m convinced nothing captures the dynamic of a newsroom dialogue about a difficult story better than a Wikipedia talk page. If you have never waded into a talk page discussion, definitely do take a look. I’m almost always impressed by the sincerity of the Wikipedia editors’ desire to get the story right, and their diligence in shepherding tricky editorial issues to a conclusion. They grapple with a range of truly journalistic issues with a scrupulousness that would satisfy the most severe editor.
In the Barack Obama article, for example, an editor asks whether the lede of the article sounds too promotional:
“After announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama emphasized withdrawing American troops from Iraq, energy independence, decreasing the influence of lobbyists, and promoting universal health care as top national priorities.”
None of the other 3 candidates have a section which describes their campaign goals, so I have a few questions: 1. Is this type of language appropriate for Obama? 2. Would a sentence like this be appropriate for each of the other candidates? If not, why?
Our stories certainly don’t betray the back-and-forth that goes into making decisions about which information to include and how to present it. But I imagine if they did, the result would look a lot like a talk page.
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- On transparency: part 1 I’ve been mum for the past week because I’ve been...
- On transparency: part 2 I was all set to jump in and make some...
- On transparency: part 4 All right, this is it for the transparency series for...
Wired’s project compiling all internal correspondence for their recent Charlie Kaufman article is the closest thing I’ve seen to a newsroom putting this into action.
Of course, while that was kind of fun for a bit, I pretty quickly lost interest in the behind-the-scenes back-and-forths and just waited for the finished article.
Seems like this kind of transparency is more for transparency’s sake, while the kind of transparency you talk about in Part 1 is more interesting (asking questions about what you don’t know makes people want to read the next post to see if you’ve found the answer) and helps further reporting (as you pointed out about TPM’s audience reliance).
Josh Korr
6 Nov 08 at 4:43 pm